Car insurance cheaper with retirement?

Aphid

Our car insurance renewal premium has been reduced after informing them that I have retired. But why?
I have only been a named driver on my wife’s car insurance policy, for 7 years now, since she is the main driver, mostly for her to get to work each day. The policy asks for my profession - supermarket home shopping delivery driver. I use my scooter for the short commute to work and back and I have my own insurance policy for this.
Before accepting the renewal quote for a new annual car insurance policy my wife contacted AVIVA to explain that I have now retired. The annual premium was instantly cut by about £30. When she asked why my retirement impacted on the premium, the handler said he didn’t know. All very odd. Any ideas?

Quentin

No-one knows how they assess risks. It's what the computer says!

But your previous occupation would have caused a loading

Next time her renewal is due tell her to follow MSE advice and don't simply renew!

Aphid

Thanks for the response.
I still don’t understand how my previous occupation would have had any impact. The additional driver cover was for our car that I hardly ever drive.
As for blindly accepting a renewal, that is far from the case. I more than most explore many alternatives before settling on any quote and this was no exception.

Quentin

I suggested your previous occupation as a cause for the drop in price after you changed to retired

Which is quite likely.

See for yourself by doing dummy quotes online as a delivery driver compared with retired.

When you are a named driver on someone else's policy why do you think they ask for the named drivers job?

And of course they don't know you hardly ever drove anyway!

(Why do you want to know - £30 variation in premium isn't unusual for a change of occupation)

tacpot12

Retired people don't commute to work in rush hour. The insurance company doesn't know that a named driver is not using the car for commuting, so when you declared that you were retired, the risk of you using the car for commuting dropped away.

forgotmyname

Try a different insurer the price may increase being retired, you could be driving around all dau everyday.

Why does adding a driving with accidents to my clean record decrease the premium?

Its all very hit and miss with some strange quirks.

Aphid

Thanks for the comments which support my theory, that the insurance quotes wrongly made false assumptions, like me using the car for commuting purposes. I even wondered if they were covering me for driving the supermarket delivery vehicle, though unlikely.
I still don’t understand why being retired should matter. True, if there was a false assumption I commuted in the car, I get that. But as mentioned above, the likelihood of me using the car from time to time is now greater in my retirement.

Zorillo

They don't underwrite you individually. They lumped you in with all the other supermarket delivery drivers, most of whom will drive a car to work. You call it "false assumptions", they call it actuarial statistics, and if they didn't do it and underwrote everybody individually everybody's insurance would be many times more expensive than it is.

forgotmyname

If you did not commute you could have just said social and pleasure only not commuting. It may not have made any difference though.

lisyloo

Aphid wrote: »

Thanks for the comments which support my theory, that the insurance quotes wrongly made false assumptions, like me using the car for commuting purposes. I even wondered if they were covering me for driving the supermarket delivery vehicle, though unlikely.
I still don’t understand why being retired should matter. True, if there was a false assumption I commuted in the car, I get that. But as mentioned above, the likelihood of me using the car from time to time is now greater in my retirement.

They work on claims experience (which we don’t get to see so can neither prove nor disprove).
On the whole I’d say retirees are unlikely to be travelling at peak busy period like commuters which is an obvious reason for claims being lower as a whole.
But I would reiterate that insurers would claim it works on claims experience and not logic.

Aretnap

Retired people are generally relatively low risk for various reasons, some of which will depend on how they tend to use their cars, but some of which will simply correlate with the fact that as a demographic they are older and (allegedly) wiser than the average person.

However another factor may be that you are no longer rated on your old occupation. Many car insurance ratings factors (occupation, postcode, even credit history) are essentially markers for social class, and people from more affluent social classes tend to make fewer claims (for various reasons, which is hard to speculate on without veering into the realms of social prejudice, so let's just call it statistics). So all else being equal a doctor might expect to pay less than a cleaner. However once you are retired the system does not attempt to distinguish between retired doctors and retired cleaners - it simply lumps all retired people in together and applies an average weighting. So the doctor might see his premium go up slightly on retirement, while the cleaner might see his come down.

As above, insurance prices are not set according to your own unique circumstances, they are based on claims experience and assumptions which are true as generalisations. If you prefer to have your insurance quote tailored to your own lifestyle with no risk of false assumptions then you could go to Lloyds of London, sit down for tea and biscuits with your underwriter, talk in excruciating detail about the ins and outs of your driving style and the type of journeys you make, and see what he thinks your price should be. However you would inevitably have to pay more - a lot more - for that sort of personalised service as opposed to having a quite made by a computer based on your answers to half a dozen questions... so in practice nobody does it.